Digital multimedia capabilities can be incorporated into a wide range of devices, including digital televisions, digital direct broadcast systems, wireless communication devices, wireless broadcast systems, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop or desktop computers, digital cameras, digital recording devices, video gaming devices, video game consoles, cellular or satellite radio telephones, digital media players, and the like. Digital multimedia devices may implement video coding techniques, such as MPEG-2, ITU-H.263, MPEG-4, or ITU-H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding (AVC), to transmit and receive or store and retrieve digital video data more efficiently. Video encoding techniques may perform video compression via spatial and temporal prediction to reduce or remove redundancy inherent in video sequences.
Most conventional video sequences are provided in two-dimensional (2D) viewing format. However, three-dimensional (3D) sequences are also possible, in which case the video sequence has two or more views associated with each video frame. In this case, the two or more views may be combined on a 3D display to render 3D video. Communication of 3D video sequences can require significant amounts of additional data relative to 2D video sequences. For example, to communicate a 3D video sequence, two separate video frames may be needed to provide the two different views of each 2D video frame, thus approximately doubling the amount of data being communicated.